Wednesday, August 27, 2014

Landline Review

Landline by Rainbow Rowell was published a few weeks ago and was automatically added to my TBR; I requested it from my library so far in advance I was the second person to be added to the wait list. I like to call Rainbow Rowell's books my "one hit wonders" because I always finish them in one sitting, so I added this book to my Bout of Books 11.0 TBR and successfully finished it in one sitting at three o'clock in the morning. Now I can check off the box on my Bookish Bucket List of reading an author's entire published work. Rainbow Rowell's writing and storytelling capabilities are like sinking into a bubble bath: comfortable. I knew I was going to enjoy this book even before I knew what it was about.

Landline tells the story of Georgie McCool and the events that unfold when she stays in California one week over Christmas to pursue her lifelong dream of pitching her own sitcom to network executives instead of travelling to Nebraska with her family . When we meet Georgie, she has devoted her entire existence to being a sitcom writer and mother which resulted in a strained marriage to Neal, her stay at home husband. During the week that she is separated from her family. Georgie tries to call Neal from the old landline phone in her childhood bedroom and ends up talking to the Neal from 1998, before they were engaged. Georgie uses these phone calls to repair her relationship with her husband to find out what went wrong in their marriage.

I enjoyed this book and I am glad I read it but I feel like it came up short (I felt the same way about Rowell's other adult contemporary Attachments. She doesn't seem to have this problem with her YA books). I do not want to delve into spoilers, but throughout the novel, it seemed like Georgie was being forced to choose her marriage or her career, with a greater emphasis on the importance to her marriage. I am not saying that her marriage is not important- as a married lady myself, I agree that Georgie needed to refocus on her marriage to repair the years of damage that we witness in this novel. However, I think Georgie should have been able to fix her marriage and still have her career but the novel ended before that could happen.

Did you read Landline and feel the same way? Let me know in the comments!